I got me a Raspberry Pi 3b to use as an HTPC. I though I'd load it with LibreELEC/Kodi.

My question to yall is this: Can any of you hosers see any problem with using this French-Canadian type wireless keyboard? I know I'd have to reach farther for the entrée button and such, but it's really teh cheaps for a new one, eh? It's not as if I'd be using it to type novels, just playing movies from my home network and possibly a bit of web surfing.

The French-Canadian keyboard arrived today and it werks great! I don't usually use trakpads, but when I do I like great bigguns like this one. Very good tool for TV/couch computing. Good bargain, would buy again.

The exo-lingual layout isn't a problem at all, & the punctuators seem to be positioned correctly right out of the box. Maybe it would be clumsy to write code, i dunno.

Plink Floyd wrote:The French-Canadian keyboard arrived today and it werks great! I don't usually use trakpads, but when I do I like great bigguns like this one. Very good tool for TV/couch computing. Good bargain, would buy again.

The exo-lingual layout isn't a problem at all, & the punctuators seem to be positioned correctly right out of the box. Maybe it would be clumsy to write code, i dunno.

Here, I'll type something with it...

"Ze queek braun faux zhumped ovair zee lazee dogue"

very nice! as a canadian that is half-french (and am trying to re-learn french) i approve of this message !

How do you use a PI as a HTPC? Im curious. I have a dell that I use for internet radio mostly.. a crying shame I know. I have movies on the HDD, but I never watch them and my TV has apps for all the online stuff, that work great..

The latest Pi has HDMI, wifi, bluetooth, camera input & most importantly a fast enough proc to play HD media. I don't have a smart TV & don't think I want one, because Big Brother. Especially when the $35 Pi does the same thing but I retain complete control. It even switches on & off with the TV cause it's powered by the TV's USB plug.

I dunno about netflix but kodi seems to be the darling app for now. Its ok for basics but i plan to try some others, vlc comes to mind. I havent had spare time to monkey with any other OS but LibreElec.

Kodi supposedly streams from various dubious sources but yeah i mostly want to play vids from hdd over wifi.

I've found Kodi to be entirely suitable for local media playback from my NAS, albeit with a few hiccups here and there, but hey. Having a media library that is not tied to a nebulous "cloud" to me is a Good Thing.

I agree about "smart TVs". My ancient televisions (one is rear projection, oh my!) are kind of "dumb" and this is fine. My preference for anything cloud-y is a separate device (Roku in my case). It's probably hard to avoid getting a new TV that is "dumb" these days outside of the commercial display market (even those often have integrated PCs or media players, but at least it isn't preloaded with as much crap.)

One of the nifty things in this vein, btw, is that NEC just started making commercial monitors that you can directly integrate a Pi into. (link) I guess eventually including that $30,000 98" monitor of theirs. (The 40"-55" monitors are much more reasonably priced. )

Yeah everything is coming smart these days. I'm way beyond wanting to own media of any kind (rarely do I want to buy a movie or music anymore) but if I do, I want to make sure I can archive it and use it how I want to. I spent $$ for it and I believe that you're entitled to a tangible copy of it. The issue to me is that when you buy something and then are forced to keep it online (like with amazon's movies) eventually, their license or ability to keep it online will end at some point. They say so specifically in the TOS and you were given X amount of days to download your movies before the option was removed.

Kids movies I'd buy, but I don't see myself buying anything in the future (aside from classics I like).

I'm playing with Raspian/PIXEL now. It's a 'full featured' desktop GUI for the rpi. It comes bundled with a lot of open source apps like Python, Chromium, some MS Office cloney things, and some useful utilities like a file mgr & command line editor. I like it so far.

I thought I was hosed, though, with my FrenchCan keyboard. I couldn't make it give me the @. I tried everything I could find online but nothing worked. Finally I stumbled upon the combo: altgr + q.